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Links 19/07/2022: Alpine 3.13.11, 3.14.7 and 3.15.5; Chiark Upgraded After 30 Years



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Graphics Stack

      • Dave Airlielavapipe Vulkan 1.3 conformant

        The software Vulkan renderer in Mesa, lavapipe, achieved official Vulkan 1.3 conformance. The official entry in the table is here . We can now remove the nonconformant warning from the driver. Thanks to everyone involved!

      • Mike Blumenkrantz: Sad Trumpet Noises

        Anyone else remember way back years ago when I implemented descriptor caching for zink because I couldn’t even hit 60 fps in Unigine Heaven due to extreme CPU bottlenecking? Also because I got to make incredible flowcharts to post here?

        Good times.

        Simpler times.

        But now times have changed.

        [...]

        So wave farewell to the old code that I’ll probably delete altogether in Mesa 22.3, and embrace the new code that just works better and has been undergoing heavy testing for the past year.

    • Applications

      • Trend OceansRanger: Terminal File Manager inspired by VIM for Linux

         No doubt, Linux is one of the best operating systems, bundled with awesome and beautiful desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc.

        This desktop environment comes with its own file manager, like GNOME gives us Nautilius, KDE gives us Dolphin, and XFCE gives us Thunar, etc.

        As a curious Linux user, you may wonder, is it possible to have a file manager experience within the Linux Terminal app? Then my answer will be Ranger.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • AddictiveTipsHow to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on Linux

        Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is an action RPG developed by Ubisoft Quebec and published by Ubisoft. Here’s how you can play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on your Linux PC.

      • How to automate graphics production with Inkscape – Máirín Duffy

        I recorded a 15-minute long tutorial demonstrating how to automate the production of graphics from a CSV file or spreadsheet (basically a mailmerge type deal for graphics) in Inkscape, using the Next Generator Inkscape extension from Maren Hachmann.You can watch it below embedded from the Fedora Design Team Linux Rocks PeerTube channel, or on YouTube. (PeerTube is open source so I prefer it!)

        Below I will provide some context for how this tutorial is useful / what you can use it for, and a very high-level summary of the content in the video in case you’d rather skim text and not watch a video.

      • How to Manage Users and Groups on Ubuntu 22.04 – LinuxWizardry

        Linux is a multi-user and multi-tasking operating system. User and group management are the two most important tasks to be performed by Linux administrators.

        In Linux, each user has their own login name and a home directory. Every user belongs to a primary group, and users can be added to multiple secondary groups. All users in the group will have the same group permission on files and folders. This makes it easier to provide permission for multiple users.

        This tutorial will demonstrate how to manage users and groups in the Linux system.

      • Linux Made SimpleHow to install EarthRoyale on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install EarthRoyale on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

        If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

      • VideoHow to install Pinta on Pop!_OS 22.04 - Invidious

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Pinta on Pop!_OS 22.04.

      • OMG UbuntuHow to Install Linux Mint's Homespun Apps on Ubuntu - OMG! Ubuntu!

        Linux Mint is far more than just the Cinnamon desktop with a bit of green sprinkled on top. It also includes a number of homegrown apps crafted by Mint developers to enhance the overall experience.

        Nemo file manager is probably the best known tool in Mint’s software stable (as it’s available to install from the Ubuntu archives). But other useful tools include Bulky, Warpinator, and Hypnotix. These are well-designed, user-friendly apps ably tailored to their respective tasks but are not available in the regular Ubuntu repos.

        The good news is that you don’t have to switch to Linux Mint to use some or even all of these apps. The beauty of open-source software (especially Mint’s, which is engineered to be distro-agnostic) is that you can install (almost) anything wherever you like.

        So if you want to install Linux Mint’s apps on Ubuntu, you can!

    • Games

      • Godot EngineGodot Engine - Release candidate: Godot 3.4.5 RC 1

        While Godot 3.5 is nearing a stable release, we still want to provide relevant bug fixes to users of the current 3.4 stable branch who might not be ready to upgrade right away. It's been a long time since the release of Godot 3.4.4, and there are a few important fixes coming up in Godot 3.4.5.

        This Release Candidate is intended to help validate those fixes and make sure that Godot 3.4.5 is ready to publish.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • The Next PlatformBig Blue Turns In A Solid Quarter For Systems [Ed: IBM-sponsored jingoism; the company goes down the drain, but it pays 'journalists' to pretend all is well; IBM's business mode: shuffle the buckets, hide the fact you're rapidly shrinking]

        By all accounts, Big Blue had a pretty good quarter ending in June, with sales of its System z16 mainframes skyrocketing upwards as they do every couple of years at the beginning of a new cycle and sales of its high-end Power10 machines also getting some traction. If everything goes as planned, with the entry and midrange Power10 machines just launched and shipping at the end of this week, then the second half of 2022 should be a pretty good one for systems for IBM.

    • Debian Family

      • Frans Pop Debian Day suicide, Ubuntu, Google and the DEP-5 machine-readable copyright file

        Lars Wirzenius announced he was going to help Colin Watson push through the machine readable copyright file policy. His email does not mention who is paying him to push this policy. Colin Watson was one of the first Ubuntu employees. Lars' CV tells us he was a contractor for Ubuntu between 2007 and 2009. Was he contracted again in 2010 to push machine readable copyright?

        There are approximately 20,000 packages in Debian and each package requires a copyright file. The file aggregates copyright notices from the source code, including the names of the authors and their chosen licenses.

        The law does not require the file to be in a machine readable format. A free-form text file or even a photograph of a copyright notice is perfectly acceptable in law.

        Volunteers estimated that it would take about 1 hour for somebody to manually examine each package and convert the free-form text copyright files into a machine-readable copyright file. For all 20,000 packages, that is approximately 20,000 man-hours of work. The people pushing for this, Lars and Colin, were being paid to push this policy. Other volunteers would not be paid for the 20,000 hours of work.

        It is ironic that large companies like Ubuntu and Google have pushed for all this unnecessary work on machine-readable copyright files but now they are paying a lawyer to argue that software developers have no rights derived from copyright anyway.

      • Dizietdiziet | chiark’s skip-skip-cross-up-grade

        Two weeks ago I upgraded chiark from Debian jessie i386 to bullseye amd64, after nearly 30 years running Debian i386. This went really quite well, in fact!

        [...]

        chiark is my “colo” - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other services. chiark’s internal setup is designed to enable my users to do a maximum number of exciting things with a minimum of intervention from me.

        chiark’s OS install dates to 1993, when I installed Debian 0.93R5, the first version of Debian to advertise the ability to be upgraded without reinstalling. I think that makes it one of the oldest Debian installations in existence.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • JSON Creator Douglas Crockford Interview

        Evrone: In your opinion, what expected changes in JavaScript are going to be the most important?

        Douglas: The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. Its cobbling together of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I spent a decade trying to correct its flaws. I had a minor success with ES5. But since then, there has been strong interest in further bloating the language instead of making it better. So JavaScript, like the other dinosaur languages, has become a barrier to progress. We should be focused on the next language, which should look more like E than like JavaScript.

      • New ScientistA four-legged robot can learn to walk in an hour like a newborn foal

        Morti is controlled by an artificial intelligence algorithm that doesn’t have much information about the robot’s legs, such as the exact shape of each component. The AI mimics networks of neurons that some animals have in their spinal cords and which help them walk by making their muscles contract in a predictable rhythm.

        The AI generates walking instructions for Morti to follow. It then adjusts them based on readings from foot sensors that signal when the robot falls and loses contact with the ground. Initially, Morti falls and tumbles, but after about an hour the AI finds the best way to walk, says Ruppert.

  • Leftovers

    • The VergeA company called Meta is suing Meta for naming itself Meta

      When Facebook changed its name to Meta in October, there were a few concerns that the company was planning to dominate the nascent metaverse — but there’s one aggrieved party that’s only now going public.

      An installation-art company called META (or Meta.is) announced Tuesday that it will be suing Meta (or Facebook) for trademark violation, alleging that Zuckerberg’s name change violated the smaller company’s established brand.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The EconomistAmerica’s already-dreadful maternal mortality rate looks set to rise

        America has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialised world. With the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that abortion was a constitutional right, it is likely to rise. International comparisons are imperfect but in 2018, while in the Netherlands and Norway there were no more than three maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births, in America there were 17. Most us states that now ban abortion, or soon will, allow exceptions if a woman’s life is in danger. But abortion providers and obstetrician-gynecologists (ob-gyns) say laws tend to be so vaguely worded that they often do not know if they are breaking them.

    • Proprietary

      • The VergeApple will settle butterfly keyboard lawsuit for $50 million

        The keyboards, introduced with the 2015 MacBook, were notoriously unreliable; basically any sort of grime, crumb, or dust could make it so that a key stopped responding altogether or got stuck, resulting in embarrassing typos. Apple tried several fixes for the keyboards, but each new generation failed to fix the core issue, with computers impacted as recently as the 2019 MacBook Pros and Air. (A full list of the affected computers is included on the first page of the settlement, but it’s basically all of Apple’s laptops from 2015 to 2019.)

        The judge still has to approve the proposed settlement agreement, but the end could finally be in sight for some of those burned by Apple’s unreliable keyboard design, which the company did away with in 2020.

      • ReutersApple reaches $50 mln settlement over defective MacBook keyboards

        Apple Inc (AAPL.O) agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit by customers who claimed it knew and concealed that the "butterfly" keyboards on its MacBook laptop computers were prone to failure.

        The proposed preliminary settlement was filed late Monday night in the federal court in San Jose, California, and requires a judge's approval.

      • India TimesGoogle faces $1 billion UK trial over app store pricing

        The class action, which was certified by the Competition Appeal Tribunal on Monday, alleges Google abused its dominant position by charging up to 30% commission on popular apps on its Play Store, including Roblox, Candy Crush Saga and Tinder since October 2015.

        A detailed judgment has yet to be published, a spokesperson for the claimant group said on Tuesday.

      • The HillUS recovers more than half a million dollars in ransom payments to North Korea

        The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI disrupted ransomware operations of a North Korean state-sponsored group that targeted U.S. medical facilities, recovering roughly a half-million dollars in ransom payments made to the country, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced on Tuesday.

        Speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security, Monaco said the seizure of the ransom payments — which she said were laundered through cryptocurrency — is the latest example of the DOJ’s approach to prioritizing the prevention of cyber attacks.

    • Security

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • uni MichiganOpen source platform enables research on privacy-preserving machine learning

          “By training in-situ on data where it is generated, we can train on larger real-world data,” explained Fan Lai, U-M doctoral student in computer science and engineering, who presents the FedScale training environment at the International Conference on Machine Learning this week.

          “This also allows us to mitigate privacy risks and high communication and storage costs associated with collecting the raw data from end-user devices into the cloud,” Lai said.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Stark increase in government takedown requests in Lumen

        In the last few years, journalists, activists, and civil society members have noted that authoritarian national governments are increasingly relying on digital tools to control what information is available to their citizens online. The weaponization of government takedown requests has become a key strategy to meet this goal. Government takedown requests are a legitimate tool for removing illegal online content such as hate speech and terrorist content, but are increasingly being misused to remove lawful government criticism or other types of information that conflict with a governments’ preferred narrative. Some of the most telling evidence of this trend of increasing misuse of government takedown requests has surfaced as a result of Online Service Providers (OSPs), most notably Twitter and Google, being transparent about what information governments have asked them to remove from their services by sharing copies of the governments’ requests and demands with the Lumen database.

    • Environment

      • Teen VogueJoe Manchin and Climate Change Legislation: How the Senator Ruined Another Deal

        It's unclear how, exactly, Manchin's move Thursday would curb inflation — especially considering he himself described tax increases on wealthy Americans as central to bringing down consumer prices earlier this year. It’s also interesting choice of words, given parts of the country are literally on fire and much of America is in the midst of a dangerous heat wave — including Texas, which is burning so hot that its power grid is once again straining. Inflation is a real challenge right now, both at home and abroad. But climate change is not an abstract threat or a political game, as Manchin’s office implies; its effects are being felt, here in America and across the world, right now. And, without significant, concerted action, it will get worse. In torpedoing even the modest measures Democrats have put forth, Manchin is significantly increasing the likelihood that it will. “I’m not going to sugarcoat my disappointment here, especially since nearly all issues in the climate and energy space had been resolved,” Senator Ron Wyden said. “This is our last chance to prevent the most catastrophic — and costly — effects of climate change.”

      • Associated PressUK breaks record for highest temperature as Europe sizzles

        Britain shattered its record for highest temperature ever registered Tuesday amid a heat wave that has seared swaths of Europe, as the U.K.’s national weather forecaster said such highs are now a fact of life in a country ill-prepared for such extremes.

        The typically temperate nation was just the latest to be walloped by unusually hot, dry weather that has triggered wildfires from Portugal to the Balkans and led to hundreds of heat-related deaths. Images of flames racing toward a French beach and Britons sweltering — even at the seaside — have driven home concerns about climate change.

        The U.K. Met Office weather agency registered a provisional reading of 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.5 degrees Fahrenheit) at Coningsby in eastern England — breaking the record set just hours earlier. Before Tuesday, the highest temperature recorded in Britain was 38.7 C (101.7 F), set in 2019. By later afternoon, 29 places in the UK had broken the record.

        As the nation watched with a combination of horror and fascination, Met Office chief scientist Stephen Belcher said such temperatures in Britain were “virtually impossible” without human-driven climate change.

        He warned that “we could see temperatures like this every three years” without serious action on carbon emissions.

      • UK heatwave LIVE updates as Metrolink lines suspended and Avanti cancels all trains on hottest ever day - Manchester Evening News

        The UK and much of our regions remains under its first red extreme heat warning, issued by the Met Office

      • Energy

        • Salon[Cryptocurrencymining] uses a "disturbing" amount of energy, lawmakers find

          In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, a group of Democratic lawmakers led by Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, revealed that the seven companies have the capacity to use as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough to power all of the homes in Houston, a city of more than 2 million people.

    • Finance

      • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer)2014 Ford EV ruined because owner can’t get $14,000 battery pack. – BaronHK's Rants

        A Florida family bought a 2014 Ford Focus EV with 60,000 miles for $11,000, only to have all the dashboard lights come on, and then tow the car to the dealer, to find out it is ruined because they can’t get $14,000 battery pack.

        The dealer says even if it could get the $14,000 battery pack, that still doesn’t cover labor hours to install. I don’t know how many labor hours to change out a battery, but I do know that labor hours at dealerships tend to run between $170 an hour and $400 an hour, depending on the dealership and brand, and I can’t imagine it would take less than 4 or 5 labor hours to get this job done.

        That’s a lot of gas.

        Then, even if they fixed the battery somehow, it’s an EV, so it has all these other parts that will break, like sensors, regenerative brake parts, etc. Does Ford even make that anymore?

        This family learned an expensive lesson.

        On the battery alone, I could buy enough gas to get the Buick over 100,000 miles. And there’s an aftermarket for the parts.

        When Eric Sandeen at Red Hat bought himself a Nissan Leaf in 2012, by 2017 the battery was already acting up. Like every EV owner, he had to assure himself that cars that don’t even last 5 years “are the future of transportation”, and said, he hoped his car battery would crap out by 2018 because then Nissan would be on the hook to replace it.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • The VergeInternal documents show Facebook and Google discussing platform strategies

        New internal documents released Tuesday detail how three of Big Tech’s most prominent companies favored their own products as a means of stamping out competition. Their release comes as lawmakers push to approve stronger antitrust legislation by the end of the year.

        The documents were obtained by the House Judiciary Committee as part of its lengthy investigation into anticompetitive behavior from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook’s parent company Meta. The investigation wrapped up in 2020, but the newly published emails, memos, and reports provide new evidence backing the committee’s calls to advance tougher competition rules for the tech industry.

      • The HillTwitter wins expedited trial in Musk case

        Twitter’s lawsuit seeking to force Elon Musk to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company will take place in October, a judge ruled Tuesday.

        The social media platform’s lawyers argued in Delaware Chancery Court that Twitter is being harmed each day that its dispute with Musk continues without a resolution and asked for a court date in September.

      • NBCSenators are advancing a computer chips bill. They don't know what's in it yet.

        CHIPS-plus on Tuesday evening cleared its first procedural hurdle in a 64-34 vote, needing just 51 votes to advance. And key senators said they could pass the bill and send it to the House as early as this week. But they still haven’t agreed on what will be added into it and what will be shelved.

      • India TimesAmazon sues admins of 10K Facebook groups over fake reviews

        Amazon has filed a lawsuit against administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups it accuses of coordinating fake reviews in exchange for money or free products.

        The Seattle-based e-commerce giant said in a statement posted on its website Tuesday the Facebook groups were set up to recruit people "willing to post incentivized and misleading reviews" across its stores in the U.S. the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.

        The problem over phony reviews is not new for Amazon, or e-commerce as a whole. Amazon itself has previously sued people it said were offering fake testimonials, though lawmakers and regulators have questioned whether the company was doing enough to combat the issue.

      • The NationVoting Isn’t Enough. Our Democracy Requires Radical Reform.

        Our country is in a crisis. On a near-daily basis, evidence mounts implicating the former president of the United States in a coup attempt against our republic. And in just the past two weeks, a spate of extremist Supreme Court decisions have gotten rid of a woman’s fundamental right to make decisions about her own body, our government’s ability to regulate clean air and water as required by law, and the separation of church and state, all while curbing our ability to regulate deadly weapons.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation

        • RTLClimate deniers sow weather-map heatwave misinfo

          During the two recent heatwaves in Europe, users in various countries and languages misleadingly juxtaposed weather maps, sometimes taken from different media organisations at non-comparable dates.

          Such posts typically include messages suggesting that the colour of the maps has been changed to red by media or authorities seeking to create panic.

          AFP Fact Check has debunked several versions of the claim, which have surfaced in languages including English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian and Polish.

        • Rolling StoneExclusive: Fake Accounts Fueled the ‘Snyder Cut’ Online Army

          A toxic social media movement had already been building around the director since at least 2018, spiking with online cries for Warner Bros. to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut of Justice League two years later. As Snyder’s demands escalated behind the scenes — including for more money to finish his four-hour director’s cut of the film for HBO Max and access to intellectual property — so did a flood of attacks aimed at Warner Bros.: calls for boycotts, demands for some executives to be fired, even death threats against them. Fans went after anyone or anything deemed a danger to the so-called SnyderVerse, including directors like Adam Wingard (whose Godzilla vs. Kong launched on HBO Max 13 days after Snyder Cut and stole some of its thunder) and movies like Wonder Woman 1984 (on which Johns was a writer). The onslaught included cyber harassment so severe Warner Bros. security division got involved. (A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson declined to comment, “as this matter predates the current leadership and new company.”)

        • NBCMany Gen Zers don’t use Google. Here’s why they prefer to search on TikTok and Instagram.

          But about 40% of Gen Zers prefer to discover information — such as how to plan a vacation, decide what skincare products work best, or pick a restaurant for a meal — on other platforms.

          That's according to data shared by Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google, who at a Fortune Magazine event last week cited the company's internal research that found nearly half of young people use TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Maps or Google Search. The ages of those surveyed ranges from 18 to 24, according to TechCrunch.

        • The VergeThe Snyder Cut’s online fandom was reportedly infested with bots and bad-faith actors

          It isn’t at all surprising that bots and networks of accounts pretending to be real people were part of the throbbing mass that treated its efforts to bring the Snyder Cut to fruition like a job. What does give one pause, however, is Rolling Stone’s implication that Snyder knowingly weaponized his fandom to make it seem like a Snyder Cut existed when one did not — and remove producers Geoff Johns and Jon Berg’s names from the film’s credits when it was ultimately produced.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • India TimesIndonesia to block Facebook, Google, WhatsApp if they fail to register for licenses

        Jakarta, The Indonesian authorities are set to block social media applications and online sites including Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp in several days if they fail to register with the country's Ministry of Communications and Informatics.

        The digital giants are given time until Wednesday to complete the registration for licensing. Otherwise, the ministry will name them illegal and unlawful in the country, Xinhua news agency reported.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • VOA NewsAward-Winning Iranian Director to Fulfill Six-Year Sentence

        Iran on Tuesday ordered award-winning Iranian film director Jafar Panahi to serve out his six-year term in Tehran's Evin Prison, enforcing a previously handed-down sentence from 2011.

        The order is the latest move in a protracted government campaign to silence critics amid growing economic turmoil and political pressure.

      • RTLDiverted Ryanair flight investigation concludes Belarus 'unlawful'

        On May 23, 2021, a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania was forced to land in Minsk, with Belarusian authorities arresting dissident journalist, Roman Protasevich, and his partner, Sofia Sapega, who were on board.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • The HillDemocrats including Pressley, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib arrested at abortion rights rally outside Supreme Court

        The demonstration came more than three weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the 1973 decision that protected access to abortion. The ruling angered Democrats nationwide and prompted House Democrats to pass a pair of bills protecting access to abortion; those measures face little chance of clearing the 50-50 Senate.

        Maloney in a statement on Tuesday said “There is no democracy if women do not have control over their own bodies and decisions about their own health, including reproductive care.”

      • ABCOcasio-Cortez, other House Democrats arrested in Supreme Court abortion rights protest

        Officers then began arresting the demonstrators, though no handcuffs were seen. Police also collected IDs and took pictures of those arrested -- including of some of the lawmakers -- and brought water to the staging area for protesters to drink.

        Tuesday's event was part of Democrats' efforts to continue highlighting the Supreme Court's blockbuster decision, which allowed the implementation of stringent abortion restrictions or outright bans in at least a dozen states across the country.

      • YLEConsumers' Union: Taxi law reforms cause 40% fare hikes, worse service

        The law changes also introduced deregulated pricing to the sector, leaving taxi firms to decide how much to charge customers. But since the reforms rolled out at the beginning of 2018, fares have risen significantly faster than the country's inflation rate.

        According to Statistics Finland estimates in June, taxi fares have risen by an average of 30 percent nationally since 2015 — three years before the reforms went into effect. But in more remote areas in the north, price hikes have neared 40 percent since then.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • NBCNetflix reports loss of 1 million subscribers in the last quarter

        Netflix lost about 1 million subscribers last quarter — a better than expected result for the streaming giant, which also forecast 1 million net new subscribers for the upcoming quarter.

        The company had projected a loss of 2 million subscribers. Earlier this year, the 25-year-old company reported its first quarterly decline in subscribers — about 200,000 — in more than a decade.

      • RTLNetflix subscriber numbers drop two quarters in a row

        Netflix reported losing subscribers for the second quarter in a row Tuesday as the streaming giant battles fierce competition and viewer belt tightening, but the company assured investors of better days ahead.

        The loss of 970,000 paying customers in the most recent quarter was not as big as expected, and left Netflix with just shy of 221 million subscribers.

      • BBCNetflix loses almost a million subscribers

        The company reported its first subscriber loss since 2011 in April, news that was followed by hundreds of job cuts and a sharp drop in its share price.

      • CNNNetflix loses subscribers, but stops the bleeding

        Netflix's biggest subscriber loss came from its biggest market, the United States and Canada, where the streamer said it lost 1.3 million users in the second quarter. But that was offset by increased subscriptions elsewhere.

      • The VergeNetflix subscriber count in the US and Canada dropped by 1.3 million over the last three months

        After Netflix reported losing subscribers for the first time in over a decade last quarter, the company’s Q2 earnings report revealed the number of worldwide subscribers dipped by 1 million, including a drop of 1.28 million in the US and Canada alone between the end of March and the end of June. That’s better than its projection of losing 2 million worldwide, but the subscriber shortfall in the US and Canada is double the 600,000 drop it reported for Q1. Netflix now reports it has 73.28 million paid subscribers in the US and Canada and 220.67 million worldwide.

        This comes nearly a week after Netflix announced a partnership with Microsoft on its cheaper ad-supported tier that it expects to launch by early next year. In the letter, Netflix emphasizes that its current plans will remain ad-free. Netflix execs remain optimistic about the prospect of an ad-supported tier, noting that “over the long run, we think advertising can enable substantial incremental membership (through lower prices) and profit growth (through ad revenues).”

      • The VergeNetflix’s ad-supported tier won’t have everything at launch

        Netflix’s upcoming ad-supported offering won’t include all of the content you can currently watch on the streaming service, Netflix executives said during the company’s Q2 2022 earnings interview video.

      • The VergeNetflix’s CEO is ready for TV to die

        Netflix needs linear TV to die because it needs the streaming holdouts still using linear TV. It shed a whopping 1.3 million subscribers across the US and Canada in the last three months, according to its 2022 Q2 earnings report. With more than 220 million paying customers worldwide, it’s essentially found as many subscribers as it's going to. It’s making efforts to gain subscribers: it's got its incoming ad-supported tier (which won’t include all the content you get now), and it’s going to try and end the practice of account sharing—forcing sharers to subscribe or go without streaming to any screen bigger than a laptop. But when you’ve basically got as many subscribers as you can currently, you need your competitors (linear TV, YouTube, TikTok, the great outdoors, etc.) to do worse. So yes, of course, Hastings wants linear TV to kick the bucket.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Life updates for July

        I failed to keep up with my top surgery updates on my Dreamwidth account, but I'm healing pretty well. The chest looks and feels good except for some weird flabby bits that I'll ask the surgeon about when I see him tomorrow.

        [...]

        Maybe I'm just not cut out for a real job. I can at least save up money and pay off my debts if I do gig economy work while living with family.

    • Politics

      • The Rule of Two



        I have a personal rule that I will only listen to two arguments for any position in a go. If those two arguments don't work, then I won't waste my time listening to any more.

        I've made this a tight habit. If anyone protests (as they have) that they didn't put forward their strongest argument at the start, then I say this indicates a waste of time even more. Why put forward bad reasons, if you have good ones?

      • Doomers over the line

        For me, there are two kind of sharp dividing lines when it comes to doomerism (and people do one or the other or both, they’re independent).

        One is when people use it to shut down others. The difference between “I need a break from thinking about this” vs “you need to give up! You need to stop trying!“. The latter is what’s not OK.

    • Technical

      • The Old Computer Challenge V2: done!



        The Old Computer Challenge V2 is over! What a week! It was even more than a week, as it was from 10th to 17th july included, that was 8 days.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • AuraGem Search Engine Updat

          The AuraGem Search Engine has been brought back up and is now crawling again. The database was cleared out and redone so that I can update how data is stored.

        • The Modern Web's Many Single Points of Failure

          Running a big web service? Reliability is key to serve your customers well. You decide to move to a cloud service. They boast 99.99% uptime and many modern services to make development, deployment, and many other things easier.

          Your backends are hammered by traffic as your service grows, and since you pay for bandwidth and your customers are more globally distributed than the two or so regions you run in (that's decent redundancy and not too costly, after all) you decide to use a CDN. It's cheaper and serves your content faster.

          Oh, you also need to handle access to some services where some customers need to be able to log in but it should be closed to the general public. And DDOS protection wouldn't be bad at all. Cloudflare seems like a good choice.

          [...]

          Modern web services build their entire businesses on being available and their customers come to expect it. They use a whole suite of tools to reach that goal, but each new tool brings both benefits and risks. Would a slower development pace and a lower expectation of uptime and speed bring more security?


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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Next Month 'New Techrights' Turns Two
Next month, on the fourth week, it'll be 2 years since the migration
Online Safety Act Tries to Accomplish the Impossible
All I can say is, "good luck with that!"
 
They Tell Us That "Cloud Storage" is Safe and Robust to Incidents Like Fires
Do you have backups? Where are they and who controls them?
"Allowing SDL to default to Wayland caused a number of customer issues so keep the default at X11 for now"
2025 is another year of Wayland ambitions. It's also a year of self-fulfilling prophecies.
In The United Kingdom (UK), Microsoft Search (Bing) Falls to All-Time Low
Grow? What grow??? It's collapsing.
GNU/Linux Reaches 5% in Oman
Some GNU/Linux distros are made in Oman
Google's "AI Mode" is a Pathetic Joke Prematurely Introduced in the UK (Like "Bard", Which Sank the Company's Shares)
what Google "thinks" about PCLinuxOS
What the Free Software Foundation Started Four Decades Ago is Becoming Mainstream
"Four decades; Four freedoms; For all users"
Doing a Better Job at Labelling Slop Images
we'll label screenshots that contain slop, typically with red-coloured text overlay
Social Control Media is Out of Style
What's your excuse for wasting time on (or in) it?
Maldives: GNU/Linux at All-Time High, Windows at New Lows
data from statCounter shows a reassuring trend
Efficiency is Good, So Why Won't Governments Cull LLM Companies Using Stronger, Stringent Policies?
Like every bubble that ever existed, including some recent ones, an end will come
The Defunct Site LinuxConfig Has Published a Fake Article About Richard Stallman Using LLM Slop, Which Stallman Calls "Bullshit Generator"
Worse yet, it is writing using a "Bullshit Generator" (the term used by Stallman) about Stallman's health
Microsoft Windows Falls to All-Time Lows in Morocco and Algeria
About 70% or even less
StopGenAI in the Cyber Show (C|S)
covering a theme that we too covered a lot lately
Gemini Links 03/08/2025: Once-a-Decade Couch Shopping and Blessings in Disguise
Links for the day
Links 03/08/2025: Political Catch-up, Global Warming, and Hunger
Links for the day
Brittany Day Entered LLM Slop Into LinuxSecurity.com and Something Hilarious Happened: The Site is "Exploited"
The brainless, effortless copypasta of "slop artists" shows its limits
Links 03/08/2025: Microsoft Exchange 0-day Exploited and Avoidable Nuclear Escalation
Links for the day
Definitely Not a Ponzi Scheme
Bitcoin v Microsoft
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a Billionaires' Lobby
Billionaires that control tech companies
Microsoft Borrows 3 Billion Dollars Per Month, a Company Truly Worth Trillions Would Not Do This
if Windows (and Office) "market share" fell from about 90% to barely 30%, how come Microsoft is now "valued" at 20 times more?
It's Even Worse Than Microsoft Lunduke Puts It; GNOME is SLAPPing Journalists
In our experience, GNOME is so malicious - some elements of it in particular - that it would launch multiple simultaneous SLAPP campaigns not only against journalists but also their spouses
GNU/Linux Adoption Reaches All-Time Highs in Chile, statCounter Indicates
This month marks 4 years since Vista 11 came out (as a fake "leak") and some surveys still measure its adoption at less than 40%
Slop Will Not Change the World
Some of us grow up sooner and leave that nonsense behind (or altogether avoid/skip it)
Gemini Links 03/08/2025: Nostalgia and TOFU
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 02, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 02, 2025
Google Throwing Out the Search Engine With the Bathwater is a Complete and Utter 'Shi---ow' as the Company Drowns in Debt, Layoffs, and Worse
The mainstream media almost never mentions GAFAM debt
Operating Systems' Statistics in New Zealand: GNU/Linux Up, Windows Down to All-Time Lows
Remember all this when the media says that Microsoft became like 10 times more valuable in those 15 years (from 400 billion to 4,000 billion in alleged "worth")
Microsoft Windows "Market Share" Measured Around 2.7% in Iraq, Plunges to 6.5% in Saudi Arabia
Microsoft isn't on the agenda in Iraq
GNU/Linux Share in Sweden Has Doubled Since PewDiePie, A Swede, Recommended It
months ago he moved to GNU/Linux, then told others to consider doing the same
GNU/Linux Hits Record High in Portugal
GNU/Linux picking up in Portugal
Gemini Protocol is Not Dying, It's Growing
When people say things like "Gemini Protocol is dying" the data does not support them
GNU/Linux is Thriving This Summer
It is meanwhile acknowledged, even by Microsoft pushers, that many GNU/Linux PCs will get sabotaged next month
The End of Microsoft's Reign in Spain: Windows Falls to All-Time Lows in Spanish Web Traffic
Windows sank to new lows in Spain
The Bots Never Sleep: In The Weekends, Slopfarms Dominate Google News, Majority of Entries in Google Are Fake Articles About 'Linux'
Google is fast becoming an ocean of plagiarism; the same goes for Google News, which was supposed to have extra quality control
Russia's Yandex Has Caught Up With Bing in Terms of "Market Share"
Microsoft has been firing loads of Bing workers for over 2 years already
Canada: GNU/Linux Up to Records Highs, Windows Down to Record Lows
Microsoft already announcing some plans to shut down Vista 11
Gemini Links 02/08/2025: Transducers in Typed Racket and American ISPs
Links for the day
Links 02/08/2025: Microsoft Already Kills Vista 11 SE, Smartphone Sales Down, Truth Gets "You're Fired!" in the US
Links for the day
Video: The Rise of GNU/Linux and Free Software as Seen by RMS in 2004
DTP's founder argued that when Windows goes below 85% "market share", it'll lose its grip in the monopoly sense
Russia: GNU/Linux Rises to Highest Adoption Level Since Invasion of Ukraine
Moving up in the north
Microsoft's Latest Financial Report: We "Gained" 300 Million Dollars in "Goodwill" and Liabilities Grew by 32 Billion Dollars
Microsoft's debt has reached an all-time high
The Register US = The Register MS
Formerly The Register UK
Weeks After Microsoft Shut Down Its Operations in Pakistan Windows Falls to All-Time Lows
Only less than a month ago it was quietly revealed, based on laid-off staff, that Microsoft shut down in Pakistan
Criminal Behaviour is the Standard Operating Procedure at Microsoft
In the future I'll be able to tell how, when dealing with SLAPPs from Microsofters, their Microsoft services failed me and sometimes even blocked my contacts
GNU/Linux Rises to All-Time Highs in Europe
many people will get fired for buying Microsoft
All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux on the Client Desktop/Laptop, Based on Steam Survey
GNU/Linux rose to 2.89% in Steam
Links 02/08/2025: Blaugust 2025 and "Russia Declares Navalny Memoir ‘Extremist’"
Links for the day
Free Software is Not a Business Model
Go ahead, ask your friend, "how do you plan to monetise your children?"
When (Almost) One-Man Operations Are Disguised as Medium-Sized Companies
the CEO hides in the US (hiding from his ex-wives, 4 daughters from those wives, and Sirius staff that he defrauded)
LLM Slop Harms Real Literature, Real Web Sites, Real Journalism
LLM slop is a parasite and it'll run out of legitimate outputs
Upcoming OSI Scandal Series
The OSI is a rogue actor because it serves Microsoft in exchange for money
Slopwatch: The Issue Persists, But the Consensus in the Media Changes as Google Enrages It With LLM Plagiarism
We've meanwhile assessed the latest output from Linuxiac
Microsoft Actually in Trouble, Microsofters Unable to Obey Judges' Orders
For the second time in a week, Microsofters are unable to obey orders
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 01, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 01, 2025
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Links 02/08/2025: İstanbul Retail Inflation Reaches 42.48%, US FBI Opens Office in New Zealand
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/08/2025: ZFS, LLM Hype, and Fake Modules
Links for the day
Links 01/08/2025: Health, Conflict, and Attacks on Freedom of the Press
Links for the day
Microsoft's Debt Exploded by 15.4 Billion Dollars in the Past 9 Months Alone (Despite All the Layoffs)
As of minutes ago, at 6PM on a Friday, the numbers are made public
Meeting (Webchat) With Maria Arranz Gomez, Florian Grundies, Jürgen Janda and Konstantinos Kortsaris Confronts EPO Management About Breaking Promises and Crushing Workers
The lack of consistent messages suggests plans other than what's advertised and the lack of consultation (secrecy) likewise
Links 01/08/2025: "The Great British Firewall" and U.S. Army Sponsors Palantir
Links for the day
For Second Day in a Row, Top Story in The Register MS is "Microsoft Says"
The editor in chief exercises control over everybody else
LLMs as Attack Method Against Free Software and Programming
DDoS in "hey hi" (slop) clothing
Stability and Reliability, Backward Compatibility
I don't fancy relying on social control media as "sources"
What "the News" Looks Like in 2025
The "says" (or "sez") phenomenon
History Will Be Distorted, Sometimes Intentionally, Under the Guise of Intelligence (Manipulated/Curated Slop)
Militarised misinformation or military-grade chaff is a national security threat, even domestically
Financial Engineering Companies: A Company Worth 4 Trillion Dollars Would Not Borrow 100+ Billion Dollars at Interest Rates Like Today's
Many headlines perpetuate the lie Microsoft had just 2 waves of layoffs
Microsoft is Googlebombing "Linux" While Paying Former News Sites to Publish SPAM
How much lower will IDG sink?
Google as a 'Bullshit Generator' Disguised as Intelligence
It'll probably cause Google to get sued a lot, both by individuals and companies
As Expected, Google in the UK Now Experiments With Slop Instead of Web Search
At this point more people ought to stop and think: Does Google's search engine deserve trust?
The Data You Don't Give Away is Your Advantage
stop sharing data that does not need to be shared
Being Obedient or Doing the Right Thing
The world always changes for the better because of people who think "Outside the Box", not the cogs
Gemini Links 01/08/2025: Happy Hacking Keyboards and New Gemini Arrivals
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 31, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 31, 2025